15.) Shooting (+3)
2024 Update: How much of this ranking is due to the cool as fuck Turkish dude who showed up with no fancy gear and bossed people? A whole ton of it, to be honest. That's the stuff. The memes are outrageous with Mr. Hitman. The rest of it, with everyone else dressed as fucking Zero Dark Thirty snipers. It's all a far cooler vibe than I remembered. Also, how great was it that Guatemala won two medals in individual trap shooting in both men's (Bronze) and women's (Gold), doubling their lifetime medal count.
There is a bit of "holy hell, these guys are accurate" with things like air rifle and skeet shooting. I don't know why one person wouild be better than the other, but it is just cool to watch people hit flying and moving objects hundreds of feet away with such ease. Only reservation, is, well, you know,.... guns.
14.) Archery (+3)
2024 Update: Honestly. not much more to say than what I said below - this is a whole lot of fun. It is crazy how far the target actually is from the archers.
So it's everythign I said above, but no guns! I also love the way they bend the bow back to where it hits them in teh face, the interesting shoulder harnesses, adn again the precision. It's tough, once again, to know why one person would be better than the other - also for sports like this I do wonder why they can't have a mixed one-on-one competition. These precision/accuracy sports seem like they don't need to be gender specific.
13.) Diving (-1)
2024 Update: No real change here, it's still amazing to watch the fearlessness, and I'm getting a new appreciation for the synchronized stuff. First was the amazing US team of Cook/Bacon, and then that amazing clip of the China team where it literally looks like one person until a second before the splash. They should aways use that angle.
I haven't yet seen the diving from high platforms, but from seeing it in past I know it's fairly death-defying. The more synchronized platform stuff basically combines diving, gymnastics, which is pretty crazy. My only real criticism is I have no idea who is better or how people mess up to the naked eye.
12.) Cycling - Mountain Biking (-1)
2024 Update: No real change, but really sad the French guy couldn't hold off the UK favorite. First, because as always, fuck the UK, but mostly because it is really amazing how well the crowds have supported the French athletes. I know the 2021 games didn't have fans but what really drove that point home was hearing the hometown cheers.
It's a bit long, but its incredible what these bikers go up against. The twists, the turns, the climbs, the randoms times they fearlessly just speed over rocks and shit. It puts the other biking events to shame. Would be higher if not for the length of the race, adn how I get the sense the order about ~60% of the way through is generally what it will end up as.
11.) Judo (-2)
2024 Update: I'm not sure why I say below that I knew the rules, because my God do I not. I do guess I can tell the difference between an Ippon (which will end the match immediately) and a Wizari based on the violence, but I have no idea why sometimes when you take someone down you can attempt a submission and other times you can't. Anyway, still love the pace and the incredible worldliness of who is good.
Over the course of the pandemic, I've increasingly got into UFC. Mainly because it was the one sport that barely stopped - quickly repositioning to Fight Island back in April, 2020. Anyway, Judo is to me the Olympics version of UFC. It took a while to get the rules, but once I did I was fascinated - both at the seeming subjectiveness of the judging (a really hard slam ends it immediately, but just a regular hard slam doesn't?), but it's quick (one match ended in 13 seconds). It pits some random country combinations. They're wearing robes. Just a lot of good stuff.
10.) Badminton (-3)
2024 Update: Peacock put out this new think that in group play for Badminton and Table Tennis (still to come) they would basically show four games at once. It was nigh impossible to follow in any real way. I also am starting to lose interesting in a game where I really don't understand how a point can end without a mistake, given how slow the shuttlecock can move.
I don't understand how both (1) anyone so confidently just discriminantly whacks the shuttlecock and it always goes over, and (2) how anyone hits winners in doubles. Yet somehow this adds up to a fascinatingly fast sport that does somewhat resemble the way I've played it but just at an insane level.
9.) Rugby Sevens (-2)
2024 Update: It's weird taht this went down when I loved it again, but it's maybe due to the two that are about to come. If anything, my complaint is now that the game is too fast in terms of duration. Why just seven minute halves? Why wrap up the tournament in like three days? Give this more time to breath dammit!
It was I think the 2012 or 2016 when Rugby Sevens took it by storm - that time's Skateboarding. I got a delayed entrance. I still prefer Aussie Rules in terms of my quasi-football escapes, but I feel like I understand or at least enjoy rugby in its Olympics, seven-a-side, format. Also, America is weirdly fairly good - at the very least to run train on the UK which is always fun.
8.) Slalom Canoeing / Kayaking (+5)
2024 Update: Second biggest riser, I just grew to love this. The speed is great. Seeing people fight the demons of the rapids is great fun. There seems to be a great evenness all around in terms of waht countries can be good or bad. This is one of those sports just perfectly tailor made for the Olympics.
Really just for the comedy. Seeing people try to contor their bodies in these lonely little canoes through poles, dealing with rapids and fake rocks, and plain bonkerness, is just great fun. I have no idea what makes someone slow, and the penalties seem more arbitrary than they reall are, but it's a good time.
7.) Fencing (+10)
2024 Update: So, maybe it was the fun of watching two American's win Gold and Silver in woman's foil, including now back to back Gold winner Lee Kiefer (who is amazing), or the incredible passion of it all. But really, what did it for me was how just fucking cool was that scene at the Grand Palais. That was some Phantom of the Opera meets Medieval Times shit. It just looked so incredible. Sabre fencing still remains a complete mystery but I basically picked up the ins and outs of foil by the end. Shouts to Lee Kiefer and the rest of the fencers for some incredible stuff.
In full openness, I fenced for a bit in high school. Because of this I know enough about the rules where I should be able to follow it. Of course, I wasn't any good, so even then the sport is about 100% impossible to follow live and figure out who is doing what and who scored what. It's cool to watch though, so I'll give it some credit there.
6.) Gymnastics (No Change)
2024 Update: While I kept it at the same spot, I do think gymnastics somewhat dismayed me. I grow increasingly just, I don't know, peeved by this whole "difficulty" score based system. It just takes some of the drama out of it. Shouts to Simone Biles who is the GOAT of GOATs in this sport, but the rest of it, while still entertaining and so crucial to a great Olympics, just wasn't as great.
I wrote about it a lot in both of the past two Olympics, particularly the 2012 vintage. I still find it a showcase of supreme athleticism, of incredible precision. What I don't quite like as much is this new way of scoring which starts out with a base score for how difficult the trick/move is. I get that it makes reasonable sense - but it also takes some of the "what's the score?' joy out of it. What doesn't take the joy out is how insane all of it is.
5.) Table Tennis (-2)
2024 Update: The drop here is almost purely due to the inane quad-box way it was shown for most of its run. When it finally went down to a single box at the Quarterfinal stage, it became way, way better. Also, not sure if this is true at all, but I feel like there was slightly less insane rallies this time - at the very least in the limited time I was watching in full.
I'm somewhat ok at table tennis in that I can compete with my Indian friends to a good degree. Table tennis is easy enough to follow that you can see what the players do. This might be the one area where I play the sport but am also playing a completely different sport. The spin, the rallies, the insane speed. What I love about it is before the game they just bat the ball back and forth for practice - something that happens in tennis. Each one of these 'practice' shots is something alien to normal people, and yet they just calmly rally back adn forth. Get to the game, and it gets so much more intense. It's an amazing sport to watch on tv, and I appreciate the brevity of 11-pt sets.
4.) Handball (+1)
2024 Update: Still just so good and so purely what makes the Olympics special. For 47 other months, this sport more or less doesn't exist, and has no reason to do so, but in that 48th month it encapsulates everything - speed, teamwork, accuracy, all of it. The way the ball moves is something close to Ice Hockey, which I appreciate as well. On the whole, it is just excellent.
Long everyone's favorite, it's slowly becoming mine. It's fairly short - with two 30 minute halves. I feel like the refereeing is really random in terms of sometimes people can just get outright tackled. I'm always amused at how the goalie is completely ineffective other than somehow on what amount to penalty shots - which seem to be saved half the time. This is the defintiely the sport I would want to play out of all of these.
3.) Beach Volleyball (+1)
2024 Update: I almost thought to move this to #2, what with the backdrop of the Eifel Tower making it another just amazing venue in Paris. In the end, left it where I did, but one thing I've increasingly enjoyed is the hilarity of the visual of how many teams, especially on the women's side (which sue me, but of course is what I mostly watch) have the pairing of a tall person and a short one.
It's indoor cousin is still to come, but I still very much enjoy beach volleyball. Yes, the women's version has some very welcome sex appeal to it (granted, the indoor version does as well), but let's talk about the sport. The fact they can cover so much ground with two people on sand is amazing. The fact that everyone's body isn't covered in sand - you know, standard protocol for any time on the beach for us normal people - is even crazier. And finally, the one relative advantage beach volleyball has on regular is because its just two people, there's more strategy and finesse with these finesse shots. Give it all to me.
2.) Swimming (No Change)
2024 Update: No real change but.... does America have a swimming crisis? I wholeheartedly believe the reason there are so many damn events in swimming is because the US is so good at it we can generally build an insurmountable medal count lead. But this time, while the US still picked up a whole lot of medals, we barely won any Gold's. The world's top swimmers are just better than ours. If anything, that made me like it more.
Yes, growing up in the age of Michael Phelps and the associated US dominance in swimming helps. Us American's have had swimming as an Olympics focal point shoved down our throat for 20 years now. But there's a good reason: it's common enough that like 80% of the world can do it. You can easily see who is better than others. The races themselves are all fairly short, and because of that can be incredibldy dramatic. And there's a lot of medals. Now, that's also a very valid criticism of swimming. There/s so many damn medals - that yes it's crazy Michael Phelps has won 56 or whatever, but they give out 273 each time out (some numbers may be exaggerated...). But seeing people win medals is cool and nothign gives you more of that than swimming and its opulence of strokes and lengths.
1.) Volleyball (No Change)
2024 Update: Still to me the Gold Standard of "amazing Olympic Sport that I'm perfectly happy not caring about the rest of the four years". I write below how I probably would be a bigger volleyball fan if it was like most US sports with a domestic club league and what-not, but in all honesty that probably isn't true. I love it because in the Olympics, I get into it.
This became my favorite in 2016, when Brazil - as I learned a volleyball mad country - hosted games in front of a truly raucous crowd in the Maracanazinho. It remains so this time around. Both men's and women's are equally great. It is impossible how many incredible spikes get dug out, how many cool rallies there are. It's also always shocking how tall these men and women are. The games are intense - almost always close. The atmosphere, even without crowds, has been cool. Most Olympic sports I like because of the weirdness, or the craziness of the feats. Volleyball I love because of just hte sport - the sport, at its best level, just rocks; to the point I wonder how it didn't become a more mainstream sport globally. It's good enough as a sport it deserves to be in the first group I had in this, with basketball and tennis and golf and other sports that are good enough on their own to survive and thrive without the backing of the Olympics. But either way I'll be thankful it is.
